missiles flew everywhere, bouncing off walls and ceiling, ripping into flesh, and all five men fell.
‘Stop,’ Dekker yelled, as his remaining troopers rushed forward. ‘Second team – regroup outside. Cover the exits. Nobody goes in.’ As his men scrambled into what cover they could find and sighted their weapons at the windows and the opening where the door had been, Dekker spoke again into his microphone. ‘Ross, Dekker. The rear door was booby-trapped. I’ve five men down, injuries unknown. I’m going in alone.’
Seconds after the front door booby-trap detonated, Saadi Fouad heard another explosion at the back of the house, and realized that a second group of attackers must have smashed their way in through the rear door. Two stun grenades bounced into the hall and Fouad barely had time to close his eyes and cover his ears before they detonated. Then dark shapes poured through the oblong hole where the front door had been, diving left and right into the shadows. Fouad scrambled to his knees and squeezed the trigger of his assault rifle. He poured a lethal stream of 7.62mm shells down the stairs at a rate of six hundred rounds a minute.
The problem he had was that he was by himself, and when the Kalashnikov fell silent as the thirtieth and last round was fired, he took over three seconds to unclip the empty magazine and snap on a full one. But by that time two of the dark shapes were halfway up the stairs, and less than one tenth of a second after that he was dead.
Dekker eased his way over the threshold of the kitchen door with exaggerated care, feeling with his feet and left hand for any tripwire or other actuating device. In his right hand he held his Hockler, and he was looking everywhere for any sign of the opposition. The faded carpet covering most of the kitchen floor was dark with blood, but he didn’t look at that.
The door through to what Dekker guessed was the hallway was closed. He approached it cautiously, turned the handle and eased it open a crack, and peered out. By the dim light of the moon which was shining through the hole where the front door of the house had been, he realized he was looking straight down the muzzles of two Hocklers.
‘Dekker,’ he said with relief, and pushed the door wide. ‘Where’s the opposition?’
One of the troopers shrugged. ‘There was one upstairs, but he’s dead. Apart from him, the place seems deserted.’
‘OK. I’ve got five men down in there,’ Dekker said, gesturing back into the kitchen. ‘Second team, this is Dekker. Target appears cleared. Enter with caution and render first aid. Establish a perimeter watch – there may be opposition players in the grounds.’ He turned back to the troopers. ‘Where’s Beatty?’
‘Upstairs, with the boss.’
Hassan Abbas and his two companions had barely reached the security of the derelict outhouse when the M79 grenade took out the front door of the old mill. The sounds of the plastic explosive and the stun grenades detonating were almost as loud, and then the staccato beat of the Kalashnikov carried clearly up the hill. Seconds later the weapon fell silent, and Abbas knew that they would not be seeing Saadi Fouad again, at least not alive.
Jaafar Badri moved a length of wood carefully to one side, making sure he made no noise, to clear a space for Abbas to sit on the floor. Then he and Ibrahim took up station in positions looking down the slope towards the mill, weapons at the ready.
Abbas opened up the Samsonite bag, pulled out the laptop computer and switched it on. It seemed to take an age to load the start-up programs, but he barely noticed because he had other things to do.
He opened the bag again and removed the mobile phone, which he switched on. Then he connected a data cable between it and the laptop and put the computer and phone on the bag, clear of the floor. He pulled the Glock out of his shoulder holster, removed the magazine and swiftly ejected each round on to the stone floor in front of him. Abbas reloaded the magazine, rammed it home into the pistol and worked the slide to chamber the first round, pulled out the magazine again and added a single round from his pocket to replace the one he’d just chambered.
The last thing he needed was a weapon jam, and past experience had taught him that a freshly loaded magazine was always more reliable than one in which the bullets had been sitting for days or weeks. He had two spare magazines attached to the webbing of his shoulder holster, and he swiftly unloaded and reloaded both of them as well. He left the pistol on the ground within easy reach of his right hand, then looked down at the laptop screen where the Windows ME desktop had just appeared.
Abbas smiled, placed his forefinger on the touchpad, slid the cursor across the screen to the Internet Explorer icon and double-clicked the left-hand mouse button. The program loaded almost instantly and the ‘Connect to’ dialog box appeared on the screen as the Dial-Up Networking utility accessed the mobile phone and began dialling Wanadoo. Abbas knew that within two or three minutes at the most he could begin the detonation sequence.
Le Moulin au Pouchon
‘So where the fuck are they?’ Dekker demanded.
‘You’re sure there would have been more than one terrorist?’ Ross asked.
‘Absolutely.’ Richter was positive. ‘There are four beds in this house, four prayer mats down in the living room, but only one dead Arab up here on the landing. An Arab’s prayer mat is like his comfort blanket – he never goes anywhere without it. Somewhere there are three more of these bastards, and we’ve got to find them.’
The rear bedroom door had yielded to a round from an Arwen but, apart from the glowing screen of the desktop computer, had revealed nothing of interest. No doubt Baker, when he got his hands on the machine, would have a lot more to say.
Richter’s phone began vibrating again and he snatched it out of his pocket. ‘Richter.’
‘He’s back,’ Baker said shortly. ‘He’s calling from a mobile phone, and he’s gone straight into the Weapon Control module.’
‘You have to stop him,’ Richter said urgently, ‘because we can’t find him. Change one digit on each of the firing codes. He might think he’s mis-typed it when the system refuses to accept it, but even if he suspects that you’re doing it, it will still take him time to get you off the system.’
‘Right,’ Baker replied, and rang off.
‘He’s on the system again,’ Richter said. ‘He’s here somewhere, and we have to find him now.’
A trooper appeared at the foot of the stairs and called up. ‘Boss, the kitchen, please, immediate.’ Ross and Dekker ran down the stairs, Richter close behind. In the kitchen, five troopers lay flat on the floor, two obviously dead and three receiving treatment from their comrades. The faded carpet had been pulled back against the wall, and someone had opened the trapdoor.
‘Their bolt hole,’ Dekker breathed. ‘Where does it go?’
‘I’ve been down it, just to the bottom of the ladder,’ the trooper said, ‘and there’s a passage that runs underneath the house, but they must have gone up the hill, because the downward passage has a metal grille fitted across it. It’s real old, and real solid.’
Dekker looked at Ross. ‘We don’t go down it,’ he said flatly. ‘If they booby-trapped the doors, there’s no way there isn’t some sort of a nasty surprise waiting for us down there.’
‘There’s no point in going down there,’ Richter said. ‘They just used this to get out of the house. It has to lead to a building or just out into the fields somewhere.’
‘Right,’ Ross said. ‘Back upstairs, and see if we can pick them up with the night-vision glasses.’
Badri and Ibrahim had barely moved since they’d reached the derelict outhouse. They stood, silent as shadows behind the ruined walls, looking down the gentle incline towards the old mill, which now stood ominously silent in the faint moonlight. Behind them, crouched on the floor, Hassan Abbas was hunched over the laptop, still working on the detonation sequence. The first code he’d input had been rejected, which he had put down to a typing error, but when the second authorization code that he’d taken extreme care to get right was also rejected,
